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“I’m the one who has no friends.”

There’s things that happen in a person’s life that are so scorched in the memory and burned into the heart that there’s no forgetting them.
― John Boyne

My life has not been tough to live so far. I’ve never witnessed death, never gone through torture or slavery. I don’t have to climb mountains and cross rivers to attend school. I don’t have a sob story, an incurable illness (or any illness for that matter), or a painful experience that drives me to avenge anyone.

I do, however, have moments that have stayed with me for a long time – moments that have made me want to be a better person. One of them would be when I saw my mother cry back in elementary school.

My mother and I had an argument that day. What we were arguing about has since then long disappeared from my memory, but it probably had something to do with me not being allowed to go out to play, which resulted in a lack of friends for me even though so many classmates lived on my street. My mother ended up crying, saying that I had many friends and she had none.

My family immigrated to Canada because they believed that my sister and I would have a better life here. I cannot even fathom how they could leave everything behind for that vision. They gave up their jobs, family, and friends to come here and were faced with many hurdles: the language barrier, racism, employment credentials, and so forth.

My mother was a stay-at-home wife. Aside from interactions with other parents at my elementary school (which likely did not happen very often because of my mother’s English capabilities), my mother must have been very lonely.

This memory is burned in my mind forever because that was a moment where I realized I should be better to my parents. When you’re a kid, you only think about yourself and that’s pretty understandable. But as a kid, the sight of your parents crying feels like your entire world is crumbling apart.

Your parents are two large figures in your life. They are everything that is good, everything you should be when you grow up. They are indestructible, can fix all your problems, make all your pain go away, or at least, that’s what you think in the beginning.

We grow up and we realize that our parents are not always right, that there are many things that hurt them, and that maybe all along they were just trying their hardest to make it look like everything was okay for your sake. We notice the gray hairs on their heads, the wrinkles emerging in the corner of their eyes, and we remember that we are not the only ones getting older.

Even now as an adult, I focus a lot on my problems, my flaws, things I should be working on. I forget about things I should be doing for my parents.